First Images of the Milky Way’s Black Hole

by | May 12, 2022 | Stocks to Watch

While this has nothing to do with stocks, it’s just as exciting.

At the center of our galaxy – about 27,000 light years away – spins Sagittarius A, a black hole that’s about four million times as massive as the sun.  To get an idea of how big that is, you can fit about 1.3 million Earths inside the sun.  Now, multiply that by four million.

That’s massive.

But what’s even more interesting about our black hole is that we now have an image of it. 

This follows the 2019 pictures of the event horizon of a black hold at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy.  Like that one, our black hole is “is bending all the light around it — hence why it looks so similar. They’re far from identical beyond this, however. The Milky Way’s hole is over 1,000 times smaller and less massive. That made it a challenge to accurately visualize the gas whipping around the hole, as it orbits in minutes where M87’s gas takes days or even weeks. And while the object is huge at 4 million times more massive than the Sun, M87’s counterpart is billions of times more massive,” as noted by Yahoo Finance.

If you haven’t seen the image yet, the National Science Foundation posted it here.  There’s also video footage of the news here.

Even cooler, if you love deep space, as much as we do, you’ll love this.  Its audio from a black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster about 240 million light years away, which means when we see an image of this black hole it’s 240 million years in the past.  Also, while there is no sound in space, astronomers were able to create the audio by recording pressure waves.

For us, it’s tough to not get excited about deep space finds.  Enjoy the pictures and videos.

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